Elliott Tercorien
Sep. 7th, 2009 03:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aaaaaaaagh_skySomah's voice intruded about then, speaking to Sally; Ellen didn't hear it. The urge to pound herself in the head with her own fists and hope that she woke up in Vault 101 was very strong. Being quick and bright and able to adapt was all well and good, but this was- this was ridiculous! Insane! Didn't Mr. Brotch say that Carl Bell trained for an entire year just to qualify for his fifteen minutes as the first man in space? This was just-
A hand tapped her on the shoulder. Ellen spun around to face a blond man with a dazed, suspicious expression. Whatever time he'd spent in the aliens' freezing-pods, he didn't look much older than thirty. "Excuse me," he said. "What's... what's going on? Who are all these people?"
"I-" Ellen's tongue stalled. He was wearing combat armor, a blue-white mixture of cerametal and plastic that she knew almost well enough to place on sight, with a tiny white cross on a red background next to the neck. "Your- uniform? That's military armor, right? I've seen it before-"
"My what?" The man's pale eyes went wide with sudden horror. "Who the hell are y- oh my God, wait a minute! Aliens! I was taken by aliens! You, you must be the aliens trying to get into my mind! Well, that's not gonna work! Private Elliott Tercorien, US Army Medic, serial number 3477809." He crossed his arms over his chest and lifted his chin defiantly. "That's all I'm telling you."
Reflexively, Ellen lifted both hands. "Hey," she said, as reassuringly as she could muster, "I'm not an alien. I was kidnapped too."
Tercorien shook his head. Ellen realized with a startle that he was probably at least as terrified as she was. "I dunno, I dunno!" he said rapidly. "Maybe you assumed human form, I've heard they can do that! ... or, or maybe you are a human, but they took over your mind!" He gave her a pleading, prove-me-wrong-why-don't-you kind of look. "We have no idea how limitless their powers are!"
"They're not limitless enough to keep me from knocking one of them out with my bare hands," Ellen said. Even though she'd cleaned the blood off a while ago, she wiped at her nose again. "I just want to go home."
"You do? That's all?" Tercorien eyed her face; Ellen nodded. Slowly he said, "Then you're telling me the truth. Those... aliens took you too."
"They took all of us," Ellen said soberly. "Sally, Somah, that cowboy gentleman, the samurai, Colonel Hartigan, God rest his soul- all of us."
Tercorien closed his eyes and blew a long, long sigh between his teeth. "Look, I just want to get out of here and get back with my guys... wait a minute." He opened his eyes and looked at Ellen. "My men. My unit. Have you seen them?"
"I'm sorry," Ellen said. "There was a dead woman in one of the holding cells, and a man the aliens took away for experimentation, but he didn't look like he'd ever been military."
"Oh my God." Tercorien ran both hands over his short blond hair. "I'm responsible for them, and now they're lost, or dead. Please-" He turned to Ellen, his expression frantic. "If you mean what you say, that we're all in this together, then you've got to help me find out what happened to them!"
Ellen glanced over at where Colonel Hartigan's body lay. Much as she wanted to escape, well... something in her quailed an absolute terror at the thought of taking that poor man's spacesuit and going Out. If Tercorien's squad was still alive, who knew? Maybe one of them could do it instead. "Don't worry," she said. "I'll be glad to help."
Tercorien smiled. It was a strained, tired expression, but it was genuine. "Thank you. Thanks so much. Sorry about all this... I just can't believe this is happening."
"That makes two of us," Ellen said. "Hang on just a minute?"
"Huh? Uh, sure."
Ellen turned and waved Somah and Sally over. "Slight change of plans," she said. "Dr. Tercorien here's with the Army. He said his whole squad got kidnapped by these guys, too. I promised to help him find them before we leave."
"You sure that's a good idea?" said Somah skeptically. "It's a big ship. they could be anywhere."
"Oh, they're probably in the freezing labs if they're anywhere," said Sally. "I've been through there a couple of times. It's where they keep all the pods they're not using. There's lots of people frozen in there. If you find the right machine you can see their faces and clothes and everything."
"Tell me what the right machine looks like," said Ellen, "and Dr. Tercorien and I will get going."
"This place is huge," Tercorien said in wonder as they made their way down the corridor towards Cryogenic Storage. "How did they ever build something this big?"
"Maybe they did it in orbit," Ellen said. "If you don't have to deal with gravity pulling everything down, you can get really big, you know?"
"Yeah, that makes sense, I guess..."
"Say, Doctor-" Ellen glanced at Tercorien's armor again. "Can I ask where you're from? I know I've seen that armor before."
"Me?" Tercorien blinked, startled. "Well, I was a medic stationed with the 108th infantry battalion at Anchorage, Alaska-"
"The sim!" Ellen said, snapping her fingers.
"Excuse me?"
"I'm sorry- I had to go through a computer simulation of the Anchorage campaign a while ago. That's where I know your armor from. In the sim, Sergeant Montgomery and I wore almost exactly the same stuff. All the American soldiers did, only none of them had the medic markings."
"Figures," said Tercorien dryly. "I was with a squad of five other medics- our job was to patch people up after the Commies gunned them down. It was pretty bloody- nothing at all like what I expected when I gave up my hospital job to enlist in the army."
"I can imagine," said Ellen, thinking back to the power-armored soldier who'd run headlong into the Chinese pulse field. "How'd you get captured?"
Tercorien shrugged. "Well, it was getting dark. We'd spent the day out in the trenches keeping as many of the guys alive as we could. The Chinese had been pounding on us with these big artillery guns they had up on the mountains."
"Three of them?" Ellen said. "Bigger than houses, with barrels you could fit a person into?"
"Yeah, it was really a mess." Tercorien grimaced. "Anyway, we pitched our tents and stowed our gear, trying to catch some shut-eye. I woke up suddenly to Private Dawkins screaming... he was bathed in some kind of blue light coming from the sky. All of us froze as he just- well- vanished. We didn't know what happened. Did the Chinese come up with some new weapon? Moments later, all of us were in the blue light too... and, well, you know the rest."
Ellen shook her head. "I'm sorry to hear that," she said. "That must've been terrifying."
Tercorien offered a very small smile. "They stuck a microphone in my face at one point. Trying to get a statement or something, I guess. I mostly alternated between begging to be let go and swearing like a sailor. Not my finest moment."
"Hey, I almost blacked myself out hyperventilating," Ellen answered with a shrug. "I don't think anybody's at their best when they've been kidnapped by aliens and thrown in a place like this."
"No, probably not," Tercorien agreed. "So what's your..."
From the sound of things he'd been about to say so what's your story, but the door into Cryo had opened, and the chill on the other side was as deep as in the chamber where he and the others had been frozen. The room was blue-litten, low-ceilinged, with incomprehensible equipment scattered about- and windows running along one side. Tercorien leaned over to peer through one and sucked in a breath. "What the hell are those aliens doing in there?"
Ellen leaned over to peer in as well, and gulped. The pain in her throat was quite forgotten as she said, "Looks like-"
"Autopsies," they concluded at the same time. They looked at each other a moment; eventually Ellen said, "So, do we...?"
"I... don't think we can do anything for those people," Tercorien said. "Maybe we should-"
"I think that one saw us," Ellen said, pointing to the alien who'd looked up from its work and whipped out a zap gun Ellen was far too familiar with.
The battle didn't last long. Ellen had raided the aliens in the Steamworks for every bit of ammunition she could find, and there'd been a door into some kind of cargo hold just off the room with all the conduits; Tercorien had armed himself there. When the last of the aliens fell Ellen moved over to the autopsy tables. "I'd give you a proper burial if I could," she murmured to the two corpses, "but we don't have a choice. Rest in peace, and may God have mercy on your souls and welcome you home."
Then she took careful aim with the alien zap gun, and pulled the trigger, and kept shooting until each of the bodies blazed with light and fell to ashes.
"That was kind of you," Tercorien said as they continued on their way. "I wouldn't have thought of that."
Ellen shrugged. "Before I left my Vault, I was trained as a chaplain for several years," she said. "I had to do at least something."
"Chaplain? Really?" Tercorien blinked. "Wow. I never would've guessed. Of course, that's probably partly the uniform..."
"Oh? Do you recognize it?" Ellen glanced down at the dead woman's clothing. "I've never seen anything like it before."
"Well, it sure looks like the kind of thing that High Command wore back in Washington," Tercorien said. "Not that I was ever in their presence much, but you saw them now and then, you know? The hat's a little weird, though. I've been trying to figure out what 'E' stands for, and it's not really working."
Ellen took off the black cap and considered the emblem a moment, then shrugged and put it back on. It was too cold in here not to wear whatever could help keep her warm. "I don't know. Eagle, maybe, or Elite. All I know is that I got it off a woman who'd died in the holding cells."
"Oh."
The corridor took another turn ahead of them, opening onto a room with two of the red-garbed worker aliens. They fled at the sight of Ellen and the soldier. That was fine with Ellen. Revenge might've been nice, but aliens who cringed and ran like frightened radroaches probably weren't the aliens she wanted revenge on in the first place. She just shook her head and glanced around the room, but the only thing she recognized was-
"Oh, hey, this glyph here looks like the one they had in front of the door where you guys were frozen," Ellen said, pointing to a glowing blue design that hovered in midair. "I wonder if anybody's frozen in here?"
"Don't know," said Tercorien. "Isn't that control panel over there the same sort of thing that was in the freezer room, though?"
"Sure looks like it," Ellen said. Sure enough, when she moved over to it, there was a Y-shaped glowing blue button. Curious, she pressed it, and a pair of pods popped up from indentations in the floor. She moved forward to peer into them, but grimaced when she got the frost off the glass and actually saw inside. "Ugh. Ghouls."
"What?" said Tercorien, coming forward for a look himself. "What are- gaaah!"
"That's what happens to you if you're exposed to massive amounts of radiation but somehow manage to not die," Ellen said soberly. "You wind up with the world's worst case of cutaneous radiation syndrome, forever. There's a ghoul in the town where I live who told me that there's a couple of ghouls alive who still remember the Great War."
Tercorien shook his head slowly, expression uncomfortable. "Do you think we should let them out?" he said dubiously. "It doesn't look like they've got a lot to look forward to..."
There was something odd in his voice; Ellen glanced at him, frowning. "Something wrong?"
"Sorry. I just- I talked to Somah a little before we left," Tercorien said. "About what's waiting down there. You know, if we do escape." He nodded to the ghoul. "Stuff like this, and mutant animals, and... well, everything I've ever known or loved is pretty much gone by now, isn't it?"
Ellen didn't know what to say to that without sounding cruel. She lay a hand on Tercorien's armored forearm instead.
He smiled gratefully. "Sorry," he said. "I just... I don't know what I've got to look forward to, that's all. I'll figure it out later. We should go try to find the rest of my squad now, though. Whatever's waiting, I don't want to leave them in alien hands."
A hand tapped her on the shoulder. Ellen spun around to face a blond man with a dazed, suspicious expression. Whatever time he'd spent in the aliens' freezing-pods, he didn't look much older than thirty. "Excuse me," he said. "What's... what's going on? Who are all these people?"
"I-" Ellen's tongue stalled. He was wearing combat armor, a blue-white mixture of cerametal and plastic that she knew almost well enough to place on sight, with a tiny white cross on a red background next to the neck. "Your- uniform? That's military armor, right? I've seen it before-"
"My what?" The man's pale eyes went wide with sudden horror. "Who the hell are y- oh my God, wait a minute! Aliens! I was taken by aliens! You, you must be the aliens trying to get into my mind! Well, that's not gonna work! Private Elliott Tercorien, US Army Medic, serial number 3477809." He crossed his arms over his chest and lifted his chin defiantly. "That's all I'm telling you."
Reflexively, Ellen lifted both hands. "Hey," she said, as reassuringly as she could muster, "I'm not an alien. I was kidnapped too."
Tercorien shook his head. Ellen realized with a startle that he was probably at least as terrified as she was. "I dunno, I dunno!" he said rapidly. "Maybe you assumed human form, I've heard they can do that! ... or, or maybe you are a human, but they took over your mind!" He gave her a pleading, prove-me-wrong-why-don't-you kind of look. "We have no idea how limitless their powers are!"
"They're not limitless enough to keep me from knocking one of them out with my bare hands," Ellen said. Even though she'd cleaned the blood off a while ago, she wiped at her nose again. "I just want to go home."
"You do? That's all?" Tercorien eyed her face; Ellen nodded. Slowly he said, "Then you're telling me the truth. Those... aliens took you too."
"They took all of us," Ellen said soberly. "Sally, Somah, that cowboy gentleman, the samurai, Colonel Hartigan, God rest his soul- all of us."
Tercorien closed his eyes and blew a long, long sigh between his teeth. "Look, I just want to get out of here and get back with my guys... wait a minute." He opened his eyes and looked at Ellen. "My men. My unit. Have you seen them?"
"I'm sorry," Ellen said. "There was a dead woman in one of the holding cells, and a man the aliens took away for experimentation, but he didn't look like he'd ever been military."
"Oh my God." Tercorien ran both hands over his short blond hair. "I'm responsible for them, and now they're lost, or dead. Please-" He turned to Ellen, his expression frantic. "If you mean what you say, that we're all in this together, then you've got to help me find out what happened to them!"
Ellen glanced over at where Colonel Hartigan's body lay. Much as she wanted to escape, well... something in her quailed an absolute terror at the thought of taking that poor man's spacesuit and going Out. If Tercorien's squad was still alive, who knew? Maybe one of them could do it instead. "Don't worry," she said. "I'll be glad to help."
Tercorien smiled. It was a strained, tired expression, but it was genuine. "Thank you. Thanks so much. Sorry about all this... I just can't believe this is happening."
"That makes two of us," Ellen said. "Hang on just a minute?"
"Huh? Uh, sure."
Ellen turned and waved Somah and Sally over. "Slight change of plans," she said. "Dr. Tercorien here's with the Army. He said his whole squad got kidnapped by these guys, too. I promised to help him find them before we leave."
"You sure that's a good idea?" said Somah skeptically. "It's a big ship. they could be anywhere."
"Oh, they're probably in the freezing labs if they're anywhere," said Sally. "I've been through there a couple of times. It's where they keep all the pods they're not using. There's lots of people frozen in there. If you find the right machine you can see their faces and clothes and everything."
"Tell me what the right machine looks like," said Ellen, "and Dr. Tercorien and I will get going."
"This place is huge," Tercorien said in wonder as they made their way down the corridor towards Cryogenic Storage. "How did they ever build something this big?"
"Maybe they did it in orbit," Ellen said. "If you don't have to deal with gravity pulling everything down, you can get really big, you know?"
"Yeah, that makes sense, I guess..."
"Say, Doctor-" Ellen glanced at Tercorien's armor again. "Can I ask where you're from? I know I've seen that armor before."
"Me?" Tercorien blinked, startled. "Well, I was a medic stationed with the 108th infantry battalion at Anchorage, Alaska-"
"The sim!" Ellen said, snapping her fingers.
"Excuse me?"
"I'm sorry- I had to go through a computer simulation of the Anchorage campaign a while ago. That's where I know your armor from. In the sim, Sergeant Montgomery and I wore almost exactly the same stuff. All the American soldiers did, only none of them had the medic markings."
"Figures," said Tercorien dryly. "I was with a squad of five other medics- our job was to patch people up after the Commies gunned them down. It was pretty bloody- nothing at all like what I expected when I gave up my hospital job to enlist in the army."
"I can imagine," said Ellen, thinking back to the power-armored soldier who'd run headlong into the Chinese pulse field. "How'd you get captured?"
Tercorien shrugged. "Well, it was getting dark. We'd spent the day out in the trenches keeping as many of the guys alive as we could. The Chinese had been pounding on us with these big artillery guns they had up on the mountains."
"Three of them?" Ellen said. "Bigger than houses, with barrels you could fit a person into?"
"Yeah, it was really a mess." Tercorien grimaced. "Anyway, we pitched our tents and stowed our gear, trying to catch some shut-eye. I woke up suddenly to Private Dawkins screaming... he was bathed in some kind of blue light coming from the sky. All of us froze as he just- well- vanished. We didn't know what happened. Did the Chinese come up with some new weapon? Moments later, all of us were in the blue light too... and, well, you know the rest."
Ellen shook her head. "I'm sorry to hear that," she said. "That must've been terrifying."
Tercorien offered a very small smile. "They stuck a microphone in my face at one point. Trying to get a statement or something, I guess. I mostly alternated between begging to be let go and swearing like a sailor. Not my finest moment."
"Hey, I almost blacked myself out hyperventilating," Ellen answered with a shrug. "I don't think anybody's at their best when they've been kidnapped by aliens and thrown in a place like this."
"No, probably not," Tercorien agreed. "So what's your..."
From the sound of things he'd been about to say so what's your story, but the door into Cryo had opened, and the chill on the other side was as deep as in the chamber where he and the others had been frozen. The room was blue-litten, low-ceilinged, with incomprehensible equipment scattered about- and windows running along one side. Tercorien leaned over to peer through one and sucked in a breath. "What the hell are those aliens doing in there?"
Ellen leaned over to peer in as well, and gulped. The pain in her throat was quite forgotten as she said, "Looks like-"
"Autopsies," they concluded at the same time. They looked at each other a moment; eventually Ellen said, "So, do we...?"
"I... don't think we can do anything for those people," Tercorien said. "Maybe we should-"
"I think that one saw us," Ellen said, pointing to the alien who'd looked up from its work and whipped out a zap gun Ellen was far too familiar with.
The battle didn't last long. Ellen had raided the aliens in the Steamworks for every bit of ammunition she could find, and there'd been a door into some kind of cargo hold just off the room with all the conduits; Tercorien had armed himself there. When the last of the aliens fell Ellen moved over to the autopsy tables. "I'd give you a proper burial if I could," she murmured to the two corpses, "but we don't have a choice. Rest in peace, and may God have mercy on your souls and welcome you home."
Then she took careful aim with the alien zap gun, and pulled the trigger, and kept shooting until each of the bodies blazed with light and fell to ashes.
"That was kind of you," Tercorien said as they continued on their way. "I wouldn't have thought of that."
Ellen shrugged. "Before I left my Vault, I was trained as a chaplain for several years," she said. "I had to do at least something."
"Chaplain? Really?" Tercorien blinked. "Wow. I never would've guessed. Of course, that's probably partly the uniform..."
"Oh? Do you recognize it?" Ellen glanced down at the dead woman's clothing. "I've never seen anything like it before."
"Well, it sure looks like the kind of thing that High Command wore back in Washington," Tercorien said. "Not that I was ever in their presence much, but you saw them now and then, you know? The hat's a little weird, though. I've been trying to figure out what 'E' stands for, and it's not really working."
Ellen took off the black cap and considered the emblem a moment, then shrugged and put it back on. It was too cold in here not to wear whatever could help keep her warm. "I don't know. Eagle, maybe, or Elite. All I know is that I got it off a woman who'd died in the holding cells."
"Oh."
The corridor took another turn ahead of them, opening onto a room with two of the red-garbed worker aliens. They fled at the sight of Ellen and the soldier. That was fine with Ellen. Revenge might've been nice, but aliens who cringed and ran like frightened radroaches probably weren't the aliens she wanted revenge on in the first place. She just shook her head and glanced around the room, but the only thing she recognized was-
"Oh, hey, this glyph here looks like the one they had in front of the door where you guys were frozen," Ellen said, pointing to a glowing blue design that hovered in midair. "I wonder if anybody's frozen in here?"
"Don't know," said Tercorien. "Isn't that control panel over there the same sort of thing that was in the freezer room, though?"
"Sure looks like it," Ellen said. Sure enough, when she moved over to it, there was a Y-shaped glowing blue button. Curious, she pressed it, and a pair of pods popped up from indentations in the floor. She moved forward to peer into them, but grimaced when she got the frost off the glass and actually saw inside. "Ugh. Ghouls."
"What?" said Tercorien, coming forward for a look himself. "What are- gaaah!"
"That's what happens to you if you're exposed to massive amounts of radiation but somehow manage to not die," Ellen said soberly. "You wind up with the world's worst case of cutaneous radiation syndrome, forever. There's a ghoul in the town where I live who told me that there's a couple of ghouls alive who still remember the Great War."
Tercorien shook his head slowly, expression uncomfortable. "Do you think we should let them out?" he said dubiously. "It doesn't look like they've got a lot to look forward to..."
There was something odd in his voice; Ellen glanced at him, frowning. "Something wrong?"
"Sorry. I just- I talked to Somah a little before we left," Tercorien said. "About what's waiting down there. You know, if we do escape." He nodded to the ghoul. "Stuff like this, and mutant animals, and... well, everything I've ever known or loved is pretty much gone by now, isn't it?"
Ellen didn't know what to say to that without sounding cruel. She lay a hand on Tercorien's armored forearm instead.
He smiled gratefully. "Sorry," he said. "I just... I don't know what I've got to look forward to, that's all. I'll figure it out later. We should go try to find the rest of my squad now, though. Whatever's waiting, I don't want to leave them in alien hands."